Reading the diary of a Manhattan call girl in a Bratislava tram

Am not sure why I’m reading this one. It’s not very good. The writing style is not exactly eye-catching. The story itself is mildly entertaining. Some of it is quite boring and repetitive. Especially the parts with discussions as to why one of the call girls should stop being in contact with a client who’s ratted her out to the IRS (Internal Revenue Service). Still, I want to understand women, sexuality, and human desires as fully as I can. Plus I have a fascination for bestsellers, stale or not.

Here and there you learn some tricks that call girls use to fool clients. Like during a threesome, when one girl is on top of the client, with her back to him, the other girl only pretends to be licking her, because the client can’t see it anyway. Oh, and the author sometimes throws in a real orgasm, to make the client cum faster and feel like he did a good job, but she’ll never allow a client to kiss her on the lips.

There are also scenes where she sees her psychotherapist. It doesn’t go very deep, but I like reading about therapy, even if it’s a bad example.

I’m about halfway through the book, but so far, you get the impression that being a call girls is a rather glamorous profession.

When I was watching the interview with Rachel Moran on the show ‘On Contact’ with the incomparable Chris Hedges, I had the feeling it gave a much more realistic, and starker picture of what prostitution is like. You can see the interview below.

Years ago, here in Slovakia, I once had the opportunity to have a brief conversation with two prostitutes at a party. At least they claimed they were prostitutes. One was sort of cheerful, the other came across as poisonous, damaged, very detached, and deeply hurt, but somehow also professional. At first I thought she was some sort of unhappy business secretary.

Apparently over here it works like this: a bunch of girls rent the entire floor of an appartment block. They put their contact info on a website, with pictures. Who exactly runs that floor wasn’t clear and I forgot to ask. I assumed the girls ran it themselves, but now I think that’s highly doubtful. There’s problem a ‘pasak’ -Slovak word for ‘pimp’- who runs the place. For safety there’s a big guy who has a room somewhere on the floor. Someone they can call for back-up.

I asked if the client actually gets to sleep with the girl he chooses online.

The answer was a clear negative.

The cheerful one said: ‘We have many, many girls and many, many pictures.’

So how does it work then? Doesn’t the client get mad when he gets a different girl than the one he thought he was contacting?

‘No, the client comes over, we open the door, all of us girls line up, and he chooses one. He’s so overwhelmed that he quickly forgets that the girl in the pictures is not even there.’

I asked what was off limits.

no kissing on the mouth

no licking of pussy

no fingering of pussy

The no kissing on the mouth is to prevent intimacy.

The no touching of their vagina with fingers or tongue is to prevent infections. It is for hygienic reasons. ‘You never know where they have been with their fingers. If you allow ten guys a day to grab you everywhere with their paws, you’re bound to catch something’.

The other one has huge, fake breasts. They are so over the top they look cartoonesque.

She says: ‘If you guys could easily get an operation to make your penis bigger, you’d do it. All guys think they have a small one. Even guys who walk in with a penis the size of an underarm are insecure about the size of their penis.’

I doubt I would surgically add something to nature’s random generosity or stinginess, but you never know, maybe if it would be a very easy and safe procedure -which it isn’t- and she’s right that we’d all like to have a bigger one, so I let it slide.

I ask if they pay taxes.

This is the only question they don’t want to answer.

‘What are you? Are you from the police or something?’

I ask them if they enjoy their work.

They both claim that they do.

The cheerful one says she can’t be faithful to anyone, so this is a good solution for her.

The melancholic one says ‘all boys and girls are selfish, you can’t have a relationship, everyone is bad.’

I disagree and say that there are definitely also nice people, but she shakes her head.

I notice I’m starting to bother them with all my questions. And I get the feeling that they’re only making an effort to answer, because they’re so fascinated that as a foreigner I’m speaking Slovak.

‘Do you get any weird requests?’

The one with the over-sized artificial chest looks like a porcelain doll that’s close to a laudanum overdosis and with an eery soft, long-drawn out voice, that has some acid aftertaste to it, she says: ‘All the time, all the time’.

The cheerful one says: ‘Once I had to fist a guy up the ass. And I mean, in up to my elbow. Oh, and once there was a guy so fat that I couldn’t get my legs around him.’ She laughs.

The other one adds: ‘I don’t like it when they pull my hair during doggy-style. They pull too hard and sometimes you really don’t see it coming and it hurts.’

I ask if they have any favorite positions.

The porcelain doll nodds, but doesn’t say anything.

The cheerful one says: ‘Doggy-style. And I like to watch a guy masturbate.’

I’d like to ask more questions. Like if anyone in their family knows what they do, or when they started out, or why they started doing this (not being able to faithful doesn’t seem like a real reason to go into prostitution), but I don’t want to bother them anymore.

I thank them for wanting to talk about this.

‘It’s funny how nervous we made you!’, giggles the cheerful one.

‘Why are you so nervous? You are overly polite’, says the doll, ‘people will take advantage of you, if you don’t change that’.

I tell them I’m nervous because I had to focus on finding the right words in Slovak. A lie. It’s true that they make me nervous. Plus, am worried that I’m bothering them with my curiosity. I tend to bombard people with questions.

I leave them with their drinks and run to a friend, the host of the party, to tell them what a surprising conversation I’ve had.

‘Yeah, I know them, they’re friends of my housemate, Alessandro.’

‘The Italian guy?’

‘Yup. The one on the left is sleeping with him for free.’

The one on the left is the cheerful one.

I get the feeling that that one wasn’t lying when she said she enjoyed her work, but the other one, in her detached state, seemed to embrace her work in a fatalistic fashion.

I like Rachel Moran’s definition of prostitution as ‘commercialized sexual assault’. She says it’s true whether you’re working on the streets or whether you are an expensive escort. She also refuses to see it as a real job or as real work.

The narrator in the ‘diary of a Manhattan call girl’ says she was ‘technically’ 14 when she started ‘hooking’.

It’s hard to imagine that a girl with a solid upbringing would roll into prostitution at 14, but so far, the book doesn’t really question all of this much. It’s mostly the glamor that’s emphasized and how important it is to keep up the standards of the business and be professional at all times.

I wonder what would happen if all women everywhere would quit prostitution immediately. If they had that choice, because many don’t have that freedom.

Would there be a rise in the number of non-commercial sexual assaults. Are prostitutes keeping non-paying rapists of the street?

Or would men have an extra reason to find a way to come to terms with their sexual desires?

Or would the race to build the first line of sex robots speed up even more? They are pretty close to building robots that look very much like real women and even talk and respond creatively. Will that be the end of regular men-women relationships? When men will hook up with a hot looking robot that will fulfill all their sexual fantasies?

Some men will do that.

But I still think most men won’t fool themselves that they can find real satisfaction in porn, prostitution or sex with sex robots, no matter how realistic they may look.

Because there’s no reward in getting what comes easy.

And ulimately we really have a drive to pursue that which retreats before us.

As Matthew Hussey puts it:

By the way, the Nordic model, has a different approach to prostitution, it see prostitutes as victims. You can read more about it here.

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